Anyone here going to see the Pogues? I only had one other chance to see them, but was dead broke at the time and couldn't swing the hefty ticket price.

I picked up a brace of passes today and just the fees alone from the evil scumlords at Ticketmaster amounted to almost thirty dollars. How on earth can they justify that?

But I have them. In hand. The Pogues. I wouldn't have thought it possible years ago.

After a long period of avoiding new music, I've been on a binge recently and have been soaking up a lot of great new releases. Either there is a new, fresh musical spirit out there now in various forms or I've gotten past my curmudgeonly belief that there is nothing new under the sun. I have even gotten over a long spell of folk organicism and bought some electronic music for the first time -- Hot Chip, Fischerspooner, Ladytron, Boards of Canada -- as well as an array of other stuff, the new Shins, the Good, the Bad, and the Queen, Grizzly Bear, Joanna Newsom, Gnarls Barkley. I finally bought the Wire reissues and shored up the holes in my Roxy Music collection. Nearly everything sounds excellent to me. I can sit and do nothing but listen to music, and that's rare for me because I get antsy sitting around "doing nothing."

I'm still old-fashioned enough to want the actual CD although I immediate download it to the my iPod and put it in the closet. I suppose this is wasteful, but I grew up with vinyl and even the disc is just a pale shadow.

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The photography continues to develop but at a slower pace. I have two shoots planned for the weekend (not SG or erotic type stuff -- this is for my show of portraits later this spring). I also have an idea for an extended photo project, inspired by the films of Rohmer and Olmi. It is hard to explain, but worth pursuing assuming I can find the right people. I've been lucky in this regard. I sent out a lot of feelers before holiday time and now people are getting over the Christmas time stun and hitting reply. That, and I'd like to think there's some vague sense this is actually worthwhile and going somewhere.

I made some big prints of my photos for the first time -- 13 x 19 glossies. I thought of how the singer/guitarist from the old punk band the Wipers talked about the pleasure of simply cutting the grooves into vinyl, the tactile nature. Having the pics digital is nice, because they are easily conveyed across space, but it still doesn't beat the almost flesh and blood feeling of a mounted print that you can hang or handle, delicately or otherwise.